The Orville

Cool CGI, big music underscoring, shiny interiors and costumes that look like everyone is about to get in formation and march down the football field playing an arrangement of the latest Taylor Swift tune.

The Orville (Fox, Sundays) made its debut last night with Seth McFarlane doing what he does best – starring Seth – and opening with a pretty funny bit about spousal cheating when it’s about getting caught in bed with a panic-stricken alien. This one, a blue-hue guy who splooshes when scared.

Let’s be sure we understand this is a Star Trek-type spinoff comedy series, meant to, like, disrupt, outer space, that place that’s always been fraught with peril and discovery and drama. And that no one ought to be more qualified to do so than Mr. Family Guy, who looks cute in his marching suit.  The challenge comes from pushing the envelope every which way until it’s no longer mailable.

McFarlane, the show’s writer, dances between what he seems to want to portray as legit dramatic saga combined with silly pizza party jokes, and illustrates how you really can’t have it both ways. The movie “Airplane!” is the perfect example of a serious soap opera genre going rogue, leaving us with a permanent joke about gladiators and filling every 20 seconds with another pratfall. That was funny, because funny was what the producers aimed squarely to be.

The problem with Orville is that it tries to go both ways, dipping its characters into ostensibly real danger, running around to neutralize it, then relaxing back into goofy characterizations to frame the after-jokes that no longer fit with the seriousness of what was just supposed to have been being portrayed (self-editor: woah, interesting sentence construction).

The net result is a show that doesn’t seem to know what it is. Is it middling SciFi drama lurching boldly forward or is it cartoon shtick, portraying frat-party humor in the 24^th century? Keep on eye on your main screen to see how warped things get.